Regulators: Promoters and Repressors

The translation of the genome is governed by regulators. These are (usually short) BitStrings, and come in two distinct types; promoters and repressors. The cell has a separate store for each of these two types of regulator, and each store can contain a number of regulators of the appropriate type. Regulators may be added to the Promoter Store and Repressor Store in two ways: either by the cell creating a new regulator (by executing an appropriate reg_create instruction),^4.5 or, in the case of a multicellular program (see Section 4.3.9), by the cell being sent a regulator from a neighbouring cell. A cell can also remove regulators from its Promoter Store and Repressor Store, by executing an appropriate reg_destroy instruction.